Blogs & Ecology

Image Credit: Emma Grady

Photo by Agaton Strom

The Age

In the English speaking world outside the USA, it is the biggest shopping day of the year. In Australia they were lined up at 4:45 AM, waiting for the stores to open. Boxing Day traditionally was the day that the rich would provide for their servants, perhaps boxing up the leftovers; The Regina Leader-Post defines it differently.

Much of North America is socked in solid and getting out to shop is even less attractive than it was when all you had to worry about was paying for for the gifts. TreeHugger recently showed a range of downloadable presents in our design gift guide, but here are a few last-minute Christmas-themed ideas, starting with the most complicated: a downloadable nutcracker man from Paper Replika. ...

Image credit: Qreamteam

Amanda Chiu reports from the 14th Conference of Parties (COP 14) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Poznań, Poland.

Credit: Marion Curtis/Starpix

Earlier this month, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. joined Lexus Hybrid Living to host Waterkeeper Alliance Eco-Salon, one in a series of social events to raise awareness about sustainability. (Put simply, it's kind of like Green Drinks for rich people.) At $500 per ticket, entry wasn't cheap, but funds raised will support Waterkeeper Alliance, the non-prof...

Photo courtesy Amanda Chiu


A climate change demonstrator at

the on going conference in Poznań, Poland

by Amanda Chiu

Amanda Chiu reports from the 14th Conference of Parties (COP 14) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Poznań, Poland.

On Day 4 of the international climate change negotiations, discussions continued to move briskly. Highlights included a workshop that examined climate change risk and vulnerabilities.

Nick and I are currently in Miami attending the Sustainable Brands International conference. Check it out via live streaming video below, the next best thing to actually being here in the just-opened, uber swanky, W Hotel on steroids, Fontainebleau Resort Miami Beach.

Check out the schedule for Wednesday and Thursday and join the discussions online, even if your company slashed its travel and conferences budgets.

Just love the shape his shadow casts. Image source

We do prattle on about how the bicycle is the world's most energy efficient vehicle, but just how fast can a human go on a bicycle?

The running joke among some of my friends is that we’ll need to bring hummus (organic hummus?) to the first Green Drinks meeting in Tel Aviv, happening on December 15th from 8-10pm at Gilda. Israelis, God forbid, can’t be expected to go to a meeting without food.

Having spent two days atop the 400-foot chimney stack of the Pątnów power plant to highlight the catastrophic impact that coal-fired power stations are having on the climate, the 11 Greenpeace climbers have come down and are heading for the UN climate talks in Posnan to continue their campaign to save the climate....

Crowds wait behind closed doors shortly before the opening of Wal-Mart in Valley Stream. When the doors opened the crowd rushed into the store, a number of people were knocked down including a Wal-Mart worker who subsequently died. (Nakea Augustine / November 28, 2008), from Newsday

Image source: Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego

Stephen Roach writes in the New York Times:

The good news is that lines should be short for today’s “first shopping day” of the holiday season. The bad news is more daunting: rising unemployment, weakening incomes, falling home values, a declining stock market, record household debt and a horrific credit crunch. But there is a deeper, potentially positive, meaning to all this: Consumers are now abandoning the asset-dependent spending and saving strategies they embraced during the bubbles of the past dozen years and moving back to more prudent income-based lifestyles.